1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for measuring, analyzing, controlling, and managing high-speed Internet Protocol (IP) traffic.
2. Description of the Related Art
In this information era, the speed of Internet Protocol (IP) wire-lines is reaching high-speed rates very rapidly as a result of popular use of the Internet, along with emergence of application services requiring a large amount of bandwidth, such as Peer-to-Peer (P2P) services, Video on Demand (VoD) services, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services, or Voice over IP (VoIP) services.
Accordingly, there is a need for technology to measure, collect, analyze, control, and manage service traffic that is increased suddenly. The technology has been actively developed in a software scheme using a general-purpose server.
Recently, in order to address a packet loss problem due to high-speed lines, a hardware-based method using a high-speed Network Processor (NP) is also emerging.
To identify Internet application services in real-time, 5-tuple information, such as a source IP address, a destination IP address, a protocol, a source port number, and a destination port number, are typically used. However, to more accurately identify various and precise application services that have recently emerged, the identification is possible only when the payload of a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/IP packet must be examined For example, in the case of a P2P service and a VoD service using the Web, accurate identification of these types of applications is possible by analyzing Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) header information.
In this example, since a pattern searching function may be performed multiple times to identify a single application, performance may be reduced even though a high-speed Network Processor (NP) is used. In particular, when identifying applications without a Ternary Content Address Memory (TCAM) that enables searching for fixed-length pattern at a very high-speed, packet loss may occur because the fixed required packet processing time may not be guaranteed.